MSI Windows webpad goes on sale How much would you pay for a 10in tablet running Windows 7 Home Premium? Whatever your answer, you could still be asked to pay as much as £650 for MSI's WindPad 100, which is just such a gadget. MSI WindPad 100W To be fair, retailer Simply Electronics will actually lighten your wallet by only £500, claiming that the £150 …
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£500 doesn't seem half bad to me. It's hardly a netBook minus keybpoard, they also had to fit in a 10" touchpad screen.
I wonder, how does W7 cope with supplying a virtual keyboard? Is it a built-in option of the OS?
Any chance of a proper review rather than a rather tired attempt at a joke?
"Still even at £600 the iPad is expensive given it's essentially just a phone minus the phone and the camera."
FFS this webpad has a grown up OS, a camera, a 32gb SSD and {gasp} a USB port even.
The big question - is the OS too grown up for it? But if this thing can manage any kind of performance it's not leaving Apple any room for complacency.
Specs on the box confirmed it is indeed Atom-based (so that'd be Intel graphics too), 32GB "SSD" storage, Windows Home Ultimate and the 10"-ish screen resolution matches that in the article.
Asking price here was €500 (incl. the usual 20% IVA—the Italian version of VAT). Make of that what you will.
I've also laid house bricks that were lighter than this beast, too. Underwhelming about sums it up.
is that you can probably just install any operating system on it. If you like Windows, just install your favourite version. Most people will probably just install some version of Ubuntu Linux. Then again, if you want to create your own system, just do it, the hardware is open.
Yeh right! Simply Electronics also said they had Archos 101's in stock last November and then spent a nearly a month giving excuses as to why their logistics department hadn't been able to send one out, even though they 'definitely had one in stock assigned to me'. Order cancelations were met with the message ‘We are sorry you want to cancel, we really will have it to you soon can you confirm that you still want to cancel.’ In a loop.
*Which* Atom CPU is an important question. Netbooks with the dual core N550 go for about £320. Single core netbooks with an N450 or N455 with Windows 7 starter go for about a hundred quid less than that. If it is a dual core atom, you are paying an extra £180 or so you are getting a touch screen, a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium rather than starter (although in my experience Starter is fine on a machine of this power - most of the extras in the more expensive versions aren't useful on puny hardware like this), and 32Gb of flash rather than a (roughly) 250Gb hard drive. You can see where most of that money is going, although it is still expensive, and my guess is that the user experience on Windows 7 without a keyboard is horrible. And the screen resolution is still crap, and the aspect ratio is wrong for a tablet. And I wonder about the battery life. Is it closer to the two hours you get on many netbooks or the ten hours you get on an iPad?
If it is a single core Atom, though, the price is outrageous however you look at it.
Even NT 3.51 had a not very good Virtual keyboard. I tested the NT 4.0 one with a wacom tablet.
I'd imagine Win7 has one.
I'd rather have netbook with either a slide up screen that covers keyboard, or one where keyboard swivels underneath. The keyboard/tablets with swivel in middle + hinge are fiddly, wobbly and fragile.
By time you add weight of decent screen and batteries, the keyboard isn't much extra weight.
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